On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 18:20, Aaron Konstam wrote: > Look all this information is interesting. And indeed there have been > cpu-s that were capable of fixed point arithmetic. Pentiums are not > among them. I have not seen the source code for either bc or dc but I > doubt if they implement a form of fixed point arithmetic. It would be > possible to do this but it is an awful lot of trouble for something that > can be done in floating point arithmetic and then displayed with the > appropriate precision. > > But if you know that bc and dc actually implement fixed point arithmetic > routines ans can testify to that fact I will be interested to hear about > it. They do decimal integer math and shift the decimal point where you tell it. And they don't use the processor representation since they can handle arbitrarily large numbers. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
